Echoes in Time
by Auditory Eden
Summary: Parallel universes resonate with each other. This, any Time Lord or similarly developed species would haughtily inform you, is why most sentient creatures experience déjà vu. Offshoot of Jessa L'Rynn's A Week in the Life.


Author Auditory Eden

Rating: T

Warnings:

Notes: I'm a fairly new convert to DW (my cousins had me convinced it was a horror show, and by that I mean like "Silence of the Lambs", not like Rocky Horror or A Clockwork Orange), so I held off. The first episode I ever saw was "Fear Her", as I don't really feel "Love&Monsters" counts. Tennant is my Doctor, despite his reign having ended by the time I actually began following the show. I'm actually shocked I managed to hold off on writing any fan fiction for it nearly three months after beginning to follow the thing. O.o Very odd for me. Written in Jessa L'Rynn's "Rose-as-the-Doctor" AU.

Echoes in Time

Parallel universes are, for the most part, very similar. Five versions of the same person from five parallels are highly likely to live out almost identical lives, from their professions to their families, to their very names. This all has to do with resonance; each universe, each new parallel, is created from a split in history, and these new, divergent paths resemble each other very closely. As they continue, branching off and creating new parallels, some things change, and most do not. These unchanging factors tie the sibling universes together, and send echoes back and forth between each reality.

These echoes also affect the people inhabiting the universes.

Two parallel selves will lead similar lives, fall in love with the same person in two different worlds, will be who they are, because they feel and hear the same way, and because echoes of their other lives, their other selves, reach them across the Void.

This, any Time Lord or similarly developed species would inform you haughtily, is why most sentient creatures experience déjà vu. And, of course, the more closely the universes are bound, the more detail the echoes provide.

Colonel Alistair Gordon Lethbridge-Stewart had been traveling with the beautiful, brilliant, mysterious woman known to all as "the Doctor" for about three months, according to the Earth-timed clock the TARDIS obligingly grew on his bed-side table. They had seen many, many things, and he still was awed by the time ship, by the aliens he met and fought, and by the Doctor, a brilliant blonde woman who vibrated with life and radiated joy, but with eyes that were often laden with sadness.

Sometimes he dreamed about a different version of reality, where he encountered an odd, faceless man who called himself the Doctor, instead of the glorious blonde woman who'd actually been there. He dreamed about a wonderful woman that he loved the same way the young man was starting to love the affectionately indifferent Doctor of his life. He dreamed about meeting the odd, male Doctor with the changing faces again and again, and of working in UNIT. Of four duplicates of the not-Doctor and a strange man in all black, all on a playing board.

He mentioned the dreams to the Doctor once. She'd smiled a little, and grown distant and more sad-eyed than usual, spending the rest of that day tinkering under the console while she sang a strange, wordless song under her breath, accompanied by the sympathetic hum of the TARDIS.

Today he didn't mention the dream, and instead sat in the armchair that grew out of the TARDIS console room floor, feeling useless as the Doctor spewed suggestions and danced around the console, occasionally stopping to prod something with her sonic screwdriver.

"We could visit Mayaria, I'm pretty sure there shouldn't be any revolutions going about now, " then she paused and glanced at him. "Well, maybe not. I'm still not very good at landing her, so we might want to try for something with a bit more a safety zone, yeah?"  
"Chances are we'll just end up running for our lives anyway," intoned the Colonel, a little gloomily. Last night's odd dream had involved a woman named Doris whom he had loved very much indeed.

"Yeah, Sod's Law and all," the Doctor agreed. "Or maybe Argo—wait, no, damn, I'm pretty sure I got banned there...Although," and Lethbridge-Stewart watched as her semi-manic, entrancing smile degenerated into a thoughtful expression, "we could always go before the year three thousand, Earth time..."

"How about Raxacoricofallapatorious?" the hapless Alistair suggested, reeling off a name that had somehow come up in his dream.

The Doctor's face shut down, becoming instantly blank, although her voice remained inquisitive as she asked, "Well, lovely seas there, but where'd you hear of that one?"

The change in behavior left Alistair Gordon Lethbridge-Stewart fumbling for an excuse, and finally he threw out the single, choked word, "_Library," _before taking off towards the door to the innards of the ship.

"So, Argo then?" she'd called after him.

xXx

They had, of course, been running for their lives before tea time. Somehow, they'd managed to land, not five hundred years prior to the Doctor's last visit, but five hundred years after it, in what the Colonel was beginning to suspect was a typical manner. Of the fifty or so places they'd gone since he'd first been blown on board in a whirlwind of Doctor, at least thirty of those landings had been off, and by a margin so precisely perfect to get them into trouble that he was now quite sure it was the TARDIS herself doing it.

Argo proved itself no different, and this time they were running from two groups; the government that the Doctor had previously overthrown, now highly unsuccessful revolutionaries, and the government that she'd helped to put in place, which had then decided that she was guilty of seventeen different crimes of war and banished her as punishment, with the promise indefinite imprisonment or death upon her return to the planet. Of course.

The Doctor had been the one to see them coming, and she'd laughed in her usual, half-manic, glittering way, before taking his hand and telling him to "run!". They pelted off in the general direction of the TARDIS, and Lethbridge-Stewart hoped to hell and high water they'd make it back without first being captured and either held for a number of days or nearly executed.

Just this once, fortune seemed to be on their side, and they were safe behind the blue doors of the TARDIS, dematerializing as the two pursuing groups squabbled like small children outside the ship. The Doctor bounced round the console, speaking at ninety miles per hour, about how it was such a shame they'd ended up running again, seeing the trees in spring there was an absolute once-in-a-lifetime sort of thing, and then she moved off onto a tangent that began, as far as Lethbridge-Stewart could tell, with how a certain, more lovely tree's leaves could be used for tea making, then moved to tea in general, then finally resolved itself, after several detours, at the decision that they needed to stop for milk.

"How `bout we stop by your time, I'll get the milk, and you go visit your mum or something," she'd decided, and Alistair Gordon Lethbridge-Stewart nodded, and watched her again, pretending to keep up with her one-sided rambling.

xXx

Parting Comments: Marf. I think I started with a good idea, and like the RoseDoctor's lecture on tea, very quickly devolved. Still, this is the first bit of fan fiction, or writing at all, for that matter, that I've done in a good long while.

On another note, I think I've figured out why I'm so not motivated to write for Doctor Who; I'm not intimately familiar with every single aspect of the canon yet, nor am I ever likely to be. I suppose I should just give up on that particular neurosis, being that I'm not likely to even see every episode before I graduate form uni, so I should just get comfortable writing what I know thus far.

Ah well,

Hugs and Kisses,

Eden


End file.
